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4.5
Gary Snyder attained fame and notoriety as a participant in the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955. His fame was embellished further by his role as the model for the protagonist in Jack Kerouac's novel "The Dharma Bums". His first two books -- Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems and Myths and Texts -- solidified his position as one of the country's most interesting younger poets. But the Back Country was Snyder's masterpiece, and remains so today in a career full of high points. Written during a transition period between the author's mountain lookout jobs, stints in Japan, returns to America, marriage, divorce, journeys to India, and the cultural backdrop of the 1960s, this book is structured on these faults lines. We begin with "Far West", poems about the Sierras and Snyder's mountain jobs; we then move to "Far East", poems about Japan; "Kali" takes us to India, and represents a descent into the underworlds of Buddhist-themed suffering; and "Back" brings us back the America. The poems are taut and elliptical, with haiku-like precision. The book is a reflection of travel and the whirl of global, cultural interconnection that characterized much of the Sixties. At the time it was published, in 1968, there was simply no poetry like this in America, and Snyder deservedly became one of the nation's most celebrated poets -- a position he has maintained for almost fifty years now. There are too many good poems here to single out. If you are interested in reading one of the dozen seminal books of post-WWII American poetry, this is it. Indispensable.
